Jjot - take notes online, fast.

by farmer • 19 years ago

5 6 19 years ago

philc2• 19 years ago

Hey, glad to find this here. I was just about to post it.

This is my startup; I'm working with one other guy full time on it. We applied to ycombinator, got the in-person interview, but didn't make the summer program. You can't win them all.

I made this because I felt there's really no simple & fast way to take down short notes (meeting/class notes, todos, brainstorming, random links) online. I don't know about you, but I've been using Gmail drafts, writely, and 37signals stuff for some time and it's not really designed for this use case. I find myself thinking "just show me my notes -- don't make me click on a link to see each one" when I use products like Gmail drafts.

So here's our stab at this market. It follows the same design philosophy I try to use everywhere -- simple, lean, focused. If you've ever watched a casual computer user flounder when trying a new web2.0 app, you'll know the value of being brutally straight-forward and obvious. Jjot is obvious: you've got a bunch of boxes that look like paper notes, and you can type in them. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.

We launched recently and the reception has been pretty good. We were on delicious popular over the weekend, and were (inexplicably) moved from that list to web2.0 popular- http://del.icio.us/popular/web2.0

There's been a few posts about Jjot on the web, including one from lifehacker. Now that we've got a few users to get feedback from and improve the service, we can really work on getting some more traction. Running a service with users is 5x as fun as the building stage. All of a sudden, a lot of people care about and take notice of each change you make.

I'd love to hear any comments/ideas/criticisms; news.yc always has good product feedback. If anyone is curious as to how this thing is built (it uses some fancy client-side coding), I'd be happy to talk about it.

ph0rque2• 19 years ago

Nice app, but I already use something similar: stickit.com. How is this different from stikkit?

philc2• 19 years ago

stikkit is cool, but doesn't quite hit the nail we're aiming for. It turns out to be another wiki product, similar to BaseCamp, while Jjot is a light-weight WYSIWYG notes application. Try playing with Jjot for a few minutes to see what I mean. An example:

To edit one of my notes on Stikkit, I have to

- scan through the titles of my notes

- guess which one contains the info I need, click it, (hit back and click again if I'm wrong)

- find a small "edit" button somewhere on the page

- wait for the page to reload

- enter some text using some markup language

- hit save

With Jjot:

- scan the contents of my notes (they're all on the same page, fully editable)

- Edit the one I'm looking for, using a visual editor

That's it. No save buttons to worry about, no markup language (Jjot uses a rich text editor), and everything is on the same page. It really is sticky notes on the web.

I think Stikkit is a promising product, but I wouldn't say it meets the same needs as Jjot. If I wanted something heavier than Jjot, I might consider Stikkit, BaseCamp, or maybe an online word processor like writewith.

I also find it mildly annoying that they label my contacts "peeps," but to each his own.

ph0rque2• 19 years ago

Thanks for the reply. I definitely like the easier to use aspect of jjot, but to make it really convenient (and win me over), it would be nice to have a dashboard widget for OSX that would let me see my notes in the dashboard, but save them on the web to be able to edit/access them at e.g. work.

jsackmann• 19 years ago

cool! this (almost exactly this!) was on my list of possible ideas to pursue a few months back. great to see that it's being done.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

I found a bug:

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Jjot - take notes online, fast.

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